A solar-powered airplane finished crossing the United States on Saturday, landing in New York City after flying over the Statue of Liberty during its historic bid to circle the globe, the project team said. The spindly, single-seat experimental aircraft, dubbed Solar Impulse 2, arrived at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport at about 4 a.m. local time after it took off about five hours beforehand at Lehigh Valley International Airport in Pennsylvania, the team reported on the airplane's website. Such a pleasure to land in New York! For the 14th time we celebrate sustainability," said the project's co-founder Andre Borschberg on Twitter after flying over the city and the Statue of Liberty during the 14th leg of the trip around the globe. The Swiss team flying the aircraft in a campaign to build support for clean energy technologies hopes eventually to complete its circumnavigation in Abu Dhabi, where the journey began in March 2015. The solar cr...
On Saturday, the Soyuz crew module was attached to its rocket at Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. We watched as the completed vehicle was loaded onto a flat-bed transporter, ready to be carried to the launch pad. Mr Peake and two other crew members will launch to the International Space Station on Tuesday 15 December. During his seven-month stay on the orbiting outpost, the former Army helicopter pilot will carry out a programme of experiments and educational activities. He will be accompanied on the flight by Russian cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko and US astronaut Timothy Kopra.The Soyuz spacecraft - which carries the crew to the ISS - and its rocket are assembled at adjacent facilities at Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. On Friday, the crew module was transported by train from its assembly site - known as Building 254 - to the huge hangar-like facility designated Building 112.
More than 40 years ago, Building 112 housed a giant (105m-high) rocket known as the N-1, which was to have taken cosmonauts to the Moon. Now the facility houses the Soyuz launcher which, at 50m long, is half the size of the N-1, and is now the workhorse of Russia's manned spaceflight programme.At 09:00 local time on Saturday morning, specialist engineers began work to bond the crew module to the rest of the launcher. They finished at about 14:00.
I watched as the rocket was loaded on to a giant flat-bed transporter painted racing green. On Sunday, the transporter will be hauled by train along the railway tracks that snake across the flat steppe of Baikonur to the launch pad where Peake, Malenchenko and Kopra will begin their journey.For Tim Peake, the flight is the culmination of a three-year programme of training that has seen him travel between Houston, Florida, Moscow and Tsukuba in Japan. "One of the challenges [for astronauts] is to retain all that information as you're going through the training process and appreciate that the next time you're going to see something is in 18 months or 24 months time in space - in a very different environment."On Tuesday, as tradition dictates, Mr Peake, Mr Malenchenko and Mr Kopra signed the wall at the museum in Baikonur Cosmodrome. Mr Malenchenko also handed over a signed cosmonaut suit to museum staff.
Mr Malenchenko is one of the Russian Space Agency's (Roscosmos) most experienced cosmonauts, having clocked up some 641 days in space over the course of five flights.
During this mission, he will become only the third person to have spent more than 800 cumulative days in space after fellow cosmonauts Sergei Krikalev and Gennady Padalka - who holds the record of 879 days
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